An articulated bus, one of those that travel through cities like worms Dune, measures 18 meters. Add one more courtesy quarter, 18 centimeters or so, and you will have an image of what Jordan Díaz, a young Spaniard from Guadalajara born in Havana 23 years ago, jumped into three boats on Tuesday night, hop, step, jump, three hundredths of a second support on the ground, two with the right foot, one with the left, three bounces forward.
Díaz jumps in Rome as if he were on the moon, weightless, not subject to gravity, and the RAE dictionary helps add poetry and defines it, defines the jump, “light, loose and tenuous like gauze or fog.” . The speed, so gravid, is added by him, by his muscles, which allow him to enter the board without blinking or hesitation, at 10.50 meters per second (almost 38 kilometers per hour) to reach, according to the measurements of the Spanish specialist Pau Fradera , who recorded the competition, 6.29 meters with the hop5.72m with the step and 6.17m with the jump final, in a very balanced distribution of distances: 34.5% + 31.5% + 34%. “Jordan’s thing is wonderful, I’ve seen it several times and I love it. Efficiency and aesthetics together,” explains Ramón Cid, historical triple jumper in Spanish athletics, and coach. “Infinite bounce.”
With 18.18 meters, the third longest jump in the history of the triple, scientifically measured in the sand through video images, Díaz managed to not only break the national record and become European champion in his first performance as a Spaniard. –little crumbs–, but to star in their own chapter in the series of memorable moments in the history of athletics. The first triple in which a jump of 18.04 meters (the seventh in history), which was the distance reached by Pedro Pablo Pichardo in his second trial, is not enough to win a triple competition. The fight in which the extreme competition between the protagonists brilliantly pushed both to their limits. A perfect competition. Between Díaz and Pichardo, current Olympic champion, they jumped ten times, and only one of the jumps, 10%, was a failure (the Spanish’s third). Both had a jump of more than 18 meters and one more over 17.90 meters. The worst of the nine valid ones (Pichardo’s fourth, 17.47m, was nine centimeters better than the best of the 10 rivals, the bronze medalist, Thomas Gogdis.
“It has been a very, very high level competition. I think I have only seen something comparable in the length final of the 91 Tokyo World Championships, when 8.91m, the world record, was not enough to win,” says Iván Pedroso, Díaz’s coach, Olympic champion and nine-time world champion. , who as a young man was marked by the titanic duel between Carl Lewis and Mike Powell, the final winner with 8.95m, which remains the world record. “But I think it won’t be the first. I think there will be many competitions that will be like this when the others who are yet to jump arrive, the Burkinabe Zango, the Jamaican Hibbert… Yes, yes, the triple jump at the Olympic Games will be interesting.”
The next day, a hot morning, a sun that burns and aggravates the lack of sleep and allergies that make him sneeze constantly, Pedroso arrives, a Coca-Cola in his hand, to the Marble Stadium, the warm-up court next to the Olympic stadium. , to train Ana Peleteiro, the Galician who won the women’s triple last Sunday. The European champion has to fight with the track guard who does not want to let her pass, and, always fighting, she succeeds, and while she, who is already thinking about the next rally, on Friday the 21st, warms up and stretches, Pedroso wants to remember how he experienced the great night of the phenomena. “18-18 at the moment and the next day still has the same meaning,” she says. “You still have things to do. Yesterday I wasn’t even jumping with all her running. She did it with only nine throws, so I think everything is going well. Jordan showed signs of the quality he has and that the year of training is being perfect. “Our most important mission is the Paris Games.”
The Cuban coach, who has trained in Guadalajara for a decade, patiently directed Díaz all night. “The important thing was little by little to have sensations of the momentum race, especially the speed of entering the board, which I wanted to increase progressively, that is why it is the gradual increase in the jumps, 17.56m, 17 .82m, a null that would have been his best jump, 17.96m… and 18.18m,” says Pedroso, who praises his athlete’s competitive ability, how he jumped to his maximum at the moment when it had to be done. “That is also trained. And it was what we had talked about before. And he was able to react and that shows that, logically, the training is also going well.”
On the night there were two key moments, Pichardo’s second jump, 18.04m – “that revolutionized the competition,” says Pedroso – and a decisive detail. “He has five steps taken and another nine. So, the last four was where he had to continue. And it was where he stopped himself so as not to give anything away,” explains the coach, who also coaches Yulimar Rojas, the best triple jumper in history, and Fátima Diame, who competed in the long final. “I told him to step back. He did it and in the fifth, the 18-18, he came in like a plane. He did the competition exactly as I wanted. First a medal jump, and then, little by little, he entered with more speed, more speed, more speed. And exactly on the fifth attempt, when I told him to back off, he felt he had room to enter with more speed.”
The fans, delighted, are not only thinking about Paris. Think 18.30 meters, one centimeter more than the world record set by Jonathan Edwards in 1995. An untouchable mark? “I don’t know what people think, but we don’t think about that. We think every day to continue improving the details that made yesterday reach 18-18 and that is the way. So, we are on the right track,” he says. “We thought about running faster. Entry speed is an important key. We have worked on it and we are still in full preparation. He is fast and I think yesterday was one of the days he entered that jump the fastest. It’s the triple problem. You can enter with a lot of speed, but if you are not light on the rebounds it is of no use to you. Jonathan, who wasn’t the fastest coming in, but the time on the ground was nothing. That’s why he is the current world record holder. The relationship of the entry speed of the first and the angle, I think is what gives you what you can jump at the end. A low angle. I always tell my athletes that. You have to become a stone from the river that goes low. As soon as they rise, they sink. I’m more about speed and low angle.”
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